On Sara Moore Wagner’s Swan Wife

Swan Wife by Sara Moore Wagner. San Diego, CA: Cider Press Review, 2022. 88 pages. $18.95. Paper.

A book of poetry that simultaneously frightens and beguiles is a rare treasure; and Swan Wife, by Sara Moore Wagner, does precisely that. These original poems are often startling in their fearlessness and beauty. Each piece resonates with the astounding strangeness of everyday life and creates shifting worlds that are both fairytale and madness. The sheer weirdness of metaphor drew me in immediately, and Wagner reveals herself as an expert craftsman of the surreal image, the internal metaphor, and the spellbinding complexities of impulse, intimacy, and desire. 

Sara Moore Wagner seems to have a secret window into perception and experience, and in Swan Wife, she unravels what she sees. The poems are organic, physical, archetypal, and supernatural. The voice is startlingly honest and precise. Swan Wife examines wildness caught; but only for an instant—as a sparrow, a tensile wing, or an unsettling dream. Wagner pulls apart how we are trapped by domesticity, intimacy, gender roles, relationships, and our bodies.  

The book is built around the traditional heroic narrative structure developed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (from Swan Wife, Notes.) The poems build themselves on metaphor borrowed from fairytale and myth to explore realms of the body and the psyche of the “housewife”, Swan Wife, or woman who is half wild creature and half tethered by pacts of domesticity. The result is a world fraught with surreality; a continuous pushing and pulling of the self and the psyche as the speaker navigates the realms of womanhood, motherhood, marriage, beauty, permeability of the self, and autonomy.

The opening poem, “Licentious,” begins “When spring comes, I go naked to the lake / near the hospital where I was born” and captures a highly physical sense of intimate and psychic tension. The speaker commands “Give me a husband who’s never seen the glint / of my skin, how it looks like a knife” and conjures the ambivalent strangeness of the possum, “long-nosed, a jawful of teeth” to create a sense of being half-hidden, “playing dead” with a “pouch full/ of babies, thick as disease.” It’s a startling, visceral vision of self-mythos and quiet power. 

In “Like I Won’t Take Something from You,” the speaker intimates the strange fluidity of familial love and romantic love, the ways her body resembles and become the landscape she inhabits, her “golden hair” “like new hay / rolled into tiny suns.” The poems delve into the intricacies of long love, troubled girldom, and childhood blurring into adulthood. The woman as swan emerges in “Ball and Chain,” where the speaker’s partner calls her “swan” when she touches a dirty lake where no one will swim; he observes “you’ll go where you want,” and the speaker allows herself the metaphysical embrace, and stops herself from running. 

In addition to themes of duplicity and dislocation, the poems also explore physical vulnerability, permeability, rot, disease, and birth. There is a fascinating compartmentalization and animism of the body as separate vectors, as in the gorgeous motherhood poems “Venus Complex,” “Nervous Condition,” “Postpartum II,” and “Reward.” These subdued yet powerful pieces exemplify the mysterious, ambivalent spirit of poems so rooted in the body. 

Swan Wife is also lyrical and musical, and in “Circe Complex” Wagner draws on her singular command of sound and diction to create an elemental incantation reminiscent in spirit and sound to Glück, Plath, and Sexton. Similarly powerful are “A Woman Like That is Not Ashamed to Die,” which envisions a terrifying landscape of motherhood and wifehood and “Getting My Body Back,” which invokes Perrault’s Donkey Skin to examine self-image, grief, and the strangeness of personal physical and mental metamorphosis:

       I try on each skin like a dress,

       each one lovelier than the next—stables

       in the heart open. They’re running.

The poems in this book will surprise you. In craft and in voice, they are original, relentless, and vulnerable. Sara Moore Wagner is a poet who sees the world through her own strange prism, and in Swan Wife, the reader is offered a glimpse into worlds both alluring and frightening—yet tempered with Wagner’s hyper-perception, sensitivity, and deep instinct. 

––Mary Robles, Mid-American Review  

Featured Writer: George Looney + Interview

On Thursday February 1st at 7:30pm, Poet and writer George Looney will be reading some of his work for the Spring 2024 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. The reading will be held in the Prout Chapel on the BGSU campus. The event is open to the public.

George Looney has nourished a decades long career as a successful writer, editor, and educator; his career has produced several collections of award-winning work: including, 13 collections of poetry and 4 collections of prose.  

Looney’s work has been published in countless literary journals and anthologies such as American Writers Review and Mid-American Review in 2023 with his book review, Review of Wendell Mayo’s Twice-Born World: Stories of Lithuania and many, many more esteemed publications. His new short story collection The Visibility of Things Long Submerged was published by BOA Editions, LTD in 2023.

George Looney currently serves as a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and English at Penn State Erie where he also serves as the Editor of the literary journal, Lake Effect. Looney founded the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie. For eight years, Looney served as Editor-in-Chief of Mid-American Review after receiving his M.F.A. from Bowling Green State University; Looney now serves as the Translations Editor for Mid-American Review. We are incredibly lucky to have Looney back in Bowling Green this week; he will be reading from both his new book of stories, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged (BOA Editions) and his new collection of poetry, The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible (Cider Press Review).

To find out more information, visit George Looney here:

https://georgelooney.org/

Assistant Editor Elly Salah conducted the following interview with George Looney via email.

Elly Salah: You’ve mentioned that some of the places you write about in your fiction are real places. How do you decide what to fictionalize when drawing from real memories? 

George Looney: None of the places in The Visibility of Things Long Submerged are actual places from my memory, places I have been and am remembering. But some of the places, like Rome, GA and Subligna, GA are real places that I had to use for various reasons. For instance, I needed a small town near the Chattahoochee National Park, as that National Park is a good place to find scarlet snakes, which was important for the story. I did quite a bit of research for both of these towns, because I wanted to have a sense of the places to fit the story to the place and to use the place to create the story. Research is always a two-lane highway in the creative process. 

ES: In The Visibility of Things Long Submerged, your characters go through journeys where they question the role of faith in their lives. Would you mind sharing a little bit about how these character’s conflicts come to be: Does a character’s struggle come before the other elements of a narrative or does the narrative somehow shape the character’s struggle?

GL: In my estimation, plot is the least important element of fiction. Plot is just “this happens then this happens then this happens, etc.” The real question is, So what? And that comes from the interactions within and between characters. Putting characters in a setting and establishing conflict—or at least tension—is for me the genesis of story. 

ES: How do you see poetry and prose influencing the ways in which we interact and create spaces of faith? 

GL: Religion and faith are of course not the same thing. Art—all art, not just literature—no matter how nihilistic, has faith at its core. To make art is a positive act; it implies a faith in there being someone to “read” it, to experience it, to share the experience of it. 

ES: Could you discuss a little bit about what it’s been like serving as an editor in the literary world and also a successful writer? Do those two “roles” ever conflict? 

GL: I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to be an editor, first with Mid-American Review for many years and now with Lake Effect for many years. To get to participate in the shaping of contemporary poetry and prose—which is what literary journals do—is an honor. Editors say, this deserves to be read, this deserves an audience, this deserves to last. As for any conflict between being an editor and being a writer, the only conflict is the struggle for time. Reading the work of other writers—both good and bad—informs constantly my own skills as a writer. The two roles complement one another more than they conflict. 

ES: What was it like to create the Bachelor’s of Fine Arts program at Penn State Erie? What motivated you to start the program?

GL: I was participating in one of those “retreats” to formulate a five-year plan for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Penn State Erie, and I, sort of jokingly, suggested we should start a BFA in Creative Writing program. I had already revamped the BFA at BGSU before I left there to take a tenure-track position here (something I was never going to get at BGSU due to the attitudes of a particular Dean), and since we already had a well-funded reading series and a track in the English BA for creative writing, it seemed like a logical possibility. Then it turned out that the Chancellor loved the idea (thinking it would bring more females to a college dominated by males), and so I then had to spend a lot of time and energy creating the program, which I based on the work I had done at BGSU but trying to improve upon what I had done at BGSU. 

ES: Seeing as you are accomplished in multiple genres, would you mind sharing how your process might change when approaching a collection of prose versus a collection of poetry?

GL: The process doesn’t change, exactly. The focus is perhaps different. I agree with Ezra Pound, who argued that good poetry must be at least as well-written as good prose. The sentence is the basis of all good writing. Understanding how sentences function is essential in both poetry and prose. The only difference is in poetry you also have the line, which allows you to manipulate the sentence in an additional way. This does not include prose poetry, of course. But I realize you asked about producing collections of poetry or prose. Every book—whether prose or poetry—determines how it comes to be. The Visibility of Things Long Submerged started from one story—the first in the book—which was written as the result of a challenge like that which led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. There were three of us—myself and two graduate fiction writers—sitting in a bar on Main Street drinking and waiting for a pool table to open up, and I said, in response to something, “Jesus is a shell game,” and one of the other two said someone should write a story with that title, so we all agreed to write such a story, and I was the only one who apparently was sober enough to remember. That was the original title of “What Gives Us Voice.” The editor of New England Review requested the title change. All the other stories came out of the feeling that the characters in that story had more to do, more to say, more to discover, more to reveal. 

ES: As an expert in both poetry and prose, could you share with us a bit more about your process? This week you’ll be reading to us from both your collections of poetry and prose. Do you have any preference when it comes to reading your work? 

GL: I have no preference between giving readings of my fiction or my poetry. But I should admit, even though I’ve published a novel, a novella, and two story collections, I consider myself a poet who has written some fiction. I love reading good fiction as much as I love reading good poetry, and I have fiction writers I feel as passionately about as I feel about my favorite poets. 

ES: Reflecting on your time as an educator of creative writing, what is the single most important thing a creative writing student can take away from a course with you?

GL: A passionate love for language. And the recognition that—as Whitman declared about American poetry—the challenge is to create/discover language to express the inexpressible. To strive for anything less is to cheat yourself and, more importantly, to cheat the art of literature. 

ES: Last question, what was your favorite place to hangout or thing to do when you attended Bowling Green State University for your MFA?

GL: There are several places and things I did, much with my best friend of 35 years who sadly died 5 years ago, Douglas Smith. Playing pool and ping pong at Howards, especially after workshop nights. Playing racketball at 2 or 3 in the morning after writing in Hanna Hall for hours in a court that used to be under the stadium and was always open, and then going to Frisch’s for breakfast, and then going home to sleep. There are others, but I’ll stop there.

***

––Elly Salah, Mid-American Review

Why We Chose It: “Do Not Hold the Birds” by Carlene Kucharczyk

“Do Not Hold the Birds” by Carlene Kucharczyk was selected for publication by Mid-American Review poetry staff in Volume XLII, Number 1.

When I read this poem, I can’t help but think of those little workshops that Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other home improvement retailers held back in the day. The ones kids would be dragged to by their parents on Saturday mornings. They’d be handed planks of wood, hammers, nails, screws, and other tools they had no clue how to use. An aproned employee wearing a ball cap would walk everyone through how to build whatever was on the agenda for the day. Mothers, fathers, older siblings would do their best to reign in their little builders, trying to guide their soft hands, hoping they could complete the project, bring it home to show off to the rest of the family. 

Sometimes they’d build birdhouses. 

And while they never turned out quite as expected, there was an element of unique beauty to each of the misaligned walls, the splotchy paint, the circular hole that wasn’t exactly quite a circle, but worked all the same. 

I like to think some of those birdhouses became homes to our little, winged companions. 

In “Do Not Hold the Birds,” Kucharczyk captures the beauty of creation, the synergy within the shared melody we have the opportunity to experience with nature. The poem acts as a guide for how to live in concourse with these earthly elements we’re rather lucky to be in conversation with.

The poem opens with the lines: “Do not hold the birds, do not make / little homes of your hands, do not ache / into a man. He will be silent”

There’s something so gripping and enticing about the beginning of this poem. If we are not to hold the birds, then what are we to do? Kucharczyk responds to this question with ultimate grace and flowing language that tingles our poetic taste buds like a cup of coffee on an April morning out on the back porch—the air buzzing with birdsong and other nice things. 

What’s most impressive about this piece is its subtle ability to subvert our expectations near the conclusion. We finally learn what we are to do with our hands, with the birds, and with our lives––and we are better off because of it. 

––Caleb Edmondson, Mid-American Review  

An Interview with Amorak Huey

Amorak Huey is the author of four collections of poetry: Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021); Boom Box (Sundress Publications, 2019); Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank Books, 2018), winner of the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize; and Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress Publications, 2015).

He is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: The Insomniac Circus (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014) and A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (Porkbelly Press, 2016).

He is the co-author, with W. Todd Kaneko, of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, published by Bloomsbury Academic in January 2018. The pair also wrote the poetry chapbook Slash/Slash, published in 2021. Slash/Slash was the winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Huey is originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and grew up in Alabama. Previously, he taught at Grand Valley State University, and currently, Huey is a Professor of English at Bowling Green State University.

As of today, Auburn’s football team has yet to win a game against an SEC opponent and is 2nd to last in the SEC West. What is your opinion on the current state of the team and their future under coach Freeze?

You’re inviting me to write you an essay about how the hyper-Christian culture of college football is super toxic, especially in the South, especially in Alabama; how Hugh Freeze reminds me of the group of men who came to my house after I went to church at the First Baptist of Trussville with a junior-high friend, and their idea of outreach was to lecture my mother about how irresponsible it was that she didn’t seem to mind that her children were going to hell; how being a professor who cares about universities as sites of, you know, education means that being a serious fan of top-level Division I football is probably one of my most hypocritical traits; or maybe about how I suspect Freeze hired an offensive coordinator and gave him play-calling duties specifically so he could fire him at the end of this always-certain-to-be-a-struggle year and take over play-calling himself; or how nothing from Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side has aged all that well except for the part where Freeze comes across as stubborn and pious, self-righteous and self-interested — but anyway, Auburn has won a couple games in a row since you sent me this question, they should be bowl eligible in two weeks, and recruiting has turned around to keep their blue-chip index numbers acceptable after a few miserable seasons under a coach we don’t talk about anymore, so yeah, things are moving in the right direction.

Sorry for that, I couldn’t resist. On to poetry: Often times, your poems play a sort of balancing act with humor and devastating heartbreak. What role do you see humor inhabiting within your statements about some of the darkest truths of modern life? 

Part of the job of poetry, I believe, is embodying contradiction. Poems reach for language that means more than one thing; words and phrases that evoke seemingly opposing concepts at once. So heartbreak and humor, yes. Not as opposite as we might think. Both essential in our humanity. This question makes me happy, because I want my poems to engage with humor, right, to be funny, or kind of funny, or almost funny, even as they’re also serious, but you never know how that’s going to land. Our senses of humor are so personal, so idiosyncratic; you put the poems out there and hope for the best. Of course, there’s also a long tradition of using humor as a way into the heavy stuff. Many of my favorite comics aren’t exactly telling jokes; they’re exploring really serious stories and subjects and getting laughs along the way. Tig Notaro, for example. One of the most amazing pieces of art I know is this live stand-up act she did right after finding out she had breast cancer, and she’s processing the diagnosis in almost real time with the audience, and she’s also funny, and it’s uncomfortable and terrible and great and amazing all at once. Not that my poems are anywhere near that level. But that’s what I’m chasing. 

In Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy your poems mention the films E.T., Porky’s, Risky Business, Terminator, and reference others. What role has cinema played in the development of your voice as a poet?

Movies have been a huge part of my life. My parents divorced when I was kid, and my brother and I would spend weekends at our dad’s, and pretty much every weekend we went to the movies. Then I was like the exact right age for the video store explosion to be this, like, miracle — it’s hard to explain now, in terms that make sense in the streaming era, how crazy cool it was to be able to walk into a store in some strip mall and have this incredible array of movies available to you. Before we had kids, my wife and I went to the movies two or three times a week. As poets, as writers, as storytellers, we’re always casting about for models, for ways of perceiving, for the possibilities of narrative, and movies have always been a path toward possibility. Poets grab onto the language around them, the language they breathe in, and movies are tied up that language for me. Not just for me. For anyone growing up in the past fifty or sixty years. I mean, that’s also true of music, or TV, or any pop culture, really. Like, you read Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson or Natalie Diaz, you watch Top Gun, you listen to R.E.M. or Guns ‘N Roses or Public Enemy, you watch Game of Thrones or Andor, it all gets into your brain and rearranges you and shapes what you’re capable of making. 

Can you talk a bit about the background and the inspiration behind the poem, “Self-Portrait as an Aging Clown Going for an Evening Run on the Summer Solstice?”

It will never stop being surreal to me that I grew up to be someone with a white-collar job living in a Midwestern suburb, a dad who likes puns and grills burgers and mows the lawn and coaches my kids’ second-grade soccer teams and periodically gets serious about running and losing weight. The very thought is absurd. Yet here I am, somehow. 

Your work with titles always astounds me. My current favorite might be “The Existence of Han Solo Explains the Universe,” featured in your collection, Boom Box. When do you know a title is just right for an Amorak Huey poem? 

Well, thanks. Man, I do love titles. Often in my writing process, the title comes before the poem. Ironically, this one didn’t, not in its final form. The poem was originally published in a now-defunct online journal under the title “Han Solo Explains the Universe,” but what I meant was that, like, the fact of Han Solo explained things, not that it’s a persona poem in Han’s voice or whatever, and so luckily I got another shot when the poem made the cut for the manuscript. How do I know when a title is just right? Definitely more an art than a science — sort of like how you can’t know as a 100 percent objective fact when a poem is finished, but the more poems you read and the more poems you write, you develop an instinct and a trust in that sense. I like titles that give the reader a starting place, a jumping-off point from which the poem can meander in all sorts of surprising directions. I like titles that are funnier than the poem. I like titles that make ridiculous promises. I like titles that offer a jolt of surprise from the very beginning of the reading process. I like titles that invite, that lure, that open a door. And I like the fact that there are lots of different kinds of work titles can do and that you can always find some new rhetorical strategy. Every poem offers a new opportunity.  

How did your time as a reporter and an editor influence your evolution as a poet?

I wrote a lot of headlines in my time as an editor, which I think definitely plays into my appreciation for a good title. Maybe my best headline ever, one I actually won an award for, was on a story about a high school student who got suspended for wearing a Pepsi T-shirt to school on the day some Coca-Cola bigwig was coming to make a donation to the school. The headline was “Student calls Pepsi shirt a joke / but suspension the real thing.” Beyond headline writing, spending more than a decade in newspapers helped me hone my writing to the necessary — gave me practice saying complicated things in clear, concise language. I covered county government and a county-run hospital for a while in Elizabethtown, Ky., and so I’d have write these straightforward stories about sometimes-complicated meetings or legal topics. And of course these stories mattered, right? They mattered to the community, to the people affected by the county’s actions and decisions. Writing for a newspaper, you always had a very clear sense of audience and purpose. There was never anything abstract about the reason you were writing. I like to think I try to bring that same sense to my poems, even though poems do different work in the world than news articles — or maybe they do similar work in a different way. 

I too am a huge fan of Jason Isbell’s music. I was pleasantly surprised when Isbell showed up alongside Leonard DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s new movie, Killers of the Flower Moon. Like Isbell, have you ever considered pursuing some cross-art-form work in acting, or any other field? 

What’s the old saying about a face for radio, a voice for the newspaper? Teaching is as close as I’ll ever get to being on stage, I think. I can’t sing, I can’t even clap in rhythm, and I can barely draw a stick figure. Pretty sure words are where it’s at for me. Unless Scorsese has a bit part for me in a biopic about T.S. Eliot or something, which I’d happily take on. Call me, Marty! 

What have you enjoyed most about starting River River Books?

Starting this press with Han VanderHart has been an incredibly rewarding experience. We’ve ushered two amazing books into the world already — An Eye in Each Square by Lauren Camp, Bullet Points by Jennifer A Sutherland — with the next two to follow in January. It’s been so much work, but good work, and a pleasure to do it alongside someone who values poetry and community as I do. We’ve learned a lot about the tedious parts and the costs — always, the costs! — of being a small press. We knew it would be hard, and in some ways it’s been harder than we expected, but it’s also an honor to support these books, these poets as best as we can. 

What new projects do you have in the works?

My collaborator Todd Kaneko and I just finished going through the final proofs for the second edition of our textbook and anthology; that’ll be out in early 2024 from Bloomsbury. I have a manuscript I’m circulating. It’s called Mouth. I have a chapbook manuscript I’ve sent to a few places. I have this idea that my next book after Mouth might be new and collected prose poems, and with that in mind, I challenged my friend Chris Haven that both of us should write 15 new prose poems this month, so I’m working on that. I’m also very slowly writing a ttrpg set in a near-future, kind of cyberpunk, climate-change-ravaged, technology-dominated version of Michigan — which as I type that out, doesn’t sound as far from reality as I’d want it to. That one’s mostly just to give me a sandbox to play with worldbuilding for a while. I have no idea what, if anything, will become of the project. As you can see, I’m one of those people who tends to have too many projects in progress. I haven’t even told you about all of them. 

For my last question, I’m going to steal a question from you. If you were going to read a poem, the same poem, every day for a year, which poem would it be?

For sure it’s “Song,” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. The heart dies of this sweetness.

***

––Caleb Edmondson, Mid-American Review

Featured Writer: Charles Fort + Interview

On Thursday October 26th at 7:30pm, Poet Charles Fort will be reading some of his work for the Fall 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. The reading will be held in the Prout Chapel on the BGSU campus. The event is open to the public.

Charles Fort has preserved a decades long career that has produced 16 full-length books and chapbooks of poetry which include: The Town Clock Burning (St. Andrews Press) and We Did Not Fear the Father: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press). Fort’s poetry has appeared in countless literary journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2001, 2003, and 2016 and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors throughout his career. During his time as a professor of poetry and creative writing, Fort held the Reynolds Endowed Chair of Poetry at the University of Nebraska-Kearney where he is now Distinguished Emeritus Endowed Professor. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University.

Fort’s poetry becomes a response to his lived experience and at times seemingly addressed to someone specific, as if the epistle is holy, or, perhaps, he makes it the holiest form in which his poetry can love. In “Prose Poem for Claire Fort” from The Town Clock Burning (St. Andrew’s Press), Fort addresses his daughter, remembering her birth. The poem opens with the date and time placing us into his world at 3:23am. Fort writes, “Winter brings my wife a child and your birth arrives with the morning tide like wings alive in a jar.” Fort’s poems feel like song, like something that must be taken care of, protected. A theme throughout many of Fort’s poems is family or parental figures. In his poem “We Did Not Fear the Father” from The Best American Poetry 2001, Fort explores a more complex relationship to parenthood and family dynamics. In the final line, Fort writes, “We did not fear our father until he stooped in the dark.” His work examines the complex nuances of these relationships and peels back the layers to understand each as honest and complete as any great poet does.

To find out more information, visit Charles Fort here: https://www.poetcharlesfort.com.

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor

Assistant Editor Christopher McCormick conducted the following interview with Charles Fort via email.

Christopher McCormick: You famously wrote 300 villanelles. What was it that drew you to the form? Can you share any insights or discoveries you made while completing this project?

Charles Fort: I have now completed 500 villanelles. I believe I am finished. I started writing them 10 years ago. The subjects include: Stravinsky, Hendrix, Beethoven, Duke Ellington, Van Gogh, Beatles, Motown, Miles, Coltrane, Pinter, Manson, Charlie McCarthy, Robert Johnson, Woodstock, Coleridge, Little Black Sambo, Knucklehead Smith, Bergman films (complete catalogue) the Inferno, the ancestral Fort journey on the ship Golconda––A Villanelle Vérité Redoublé––On May, 14, 1868, the ship Golconda set sail from Savannah, Georgia to Liberia. The journey of 7 generations of Fort ancestors starboard…There is a city named Fortsville, Liberia, Stephen Hawking, others…

I was a member of a well-known weekly workshop in West Hartford, Connecticut (via Northampton, Mass. and Cape Cod) led by the former President of The Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens, once called the friends of Wallace Stevens until one member noted his scarred writing/comments on race. I credit Stevens for allowing me to disregard Ashbury and the Ashbury Jr’s that walked the halls of Bowling Green in 1975-1977. I introduced a new villanelle to workshop each week for years. The group nearly asked for reparations.

CM: “We Did Not Fear the father” is driven by two seemingly contradictory emotions: love and fear. Does contradiction play an important role in the shaping of poems?

CF: Was it Vonnegut who said writers observe the terror and absurdity in the world. I might add beauty to that paraphrase. Love, fear, and the fear of love. In an early draft of “We Did Not Fear the Father,” I called my father the scaremonger! I changed it to the honorific term: our provider.

CM: “Prose Poem for Claire Fort” begins and ends with the image “wings alive in a jar.” In fact, repetition appears throughout your work in very interesting ways. How does repetition factor into your creative process?

CF: I want repetends to dissolve the rivets of poetic forms. No matter the form, I want to alter tradition in subversive-hidden ways. At times, I create a narrative thread that allows for a contemporary sensibility inside a vessel overflowing—shipwrecked with coal and precious stones.

CM: Some of your poetry touches on personal loss, most notably your wife, Wendy Fort who passed from Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. What does it feel like to release such intimate work into the world?

CF: I wrote poems about my wife immediately after her passing into everlasting light. I felt guilty and torn between being a husband and father with two daughters. I was ashamed I was a poet. Had I taken advantage of such grief? I had to write about my experience and reveal it to the world.

CM: You seem to be equally comfortable writing in free verse, form, and prose. Are any of these favorites?

CF: In my Graduate Workshop and Seminar, in the first half of the semester, I introduced the sonnet, villanelle, sestina (using the six images within the line), prose poem, and a form I created I called a medievalist-echo-verse. The second half of the semester the students wrote whatever form or free verse they wished.

The aleatory nature of the creative process in the arts and sciences, the sullen craft. I paraphrase Stravinsky: The more one toils with the creative process, the more one is set free.

Typing poems was like playing my silver clarinet as a lad for ten years and a tenor saxophone for one. I remember the exact moment I went from writing in longhand in large artist sketchbooks to a computer. First drafts to eternal final drafts. One of my professors at Bowling Green spoke of the three conditions of language: Educated—job interviews, speaking to your parents, grandparents, asking for money: Colloquial—capturing the linguistic nuances of your birthplace: Jive—the polyphonic, street wise, warnings, and when to run fast. The writer might want to learn to master all three levels of language and write them into their work at the same time, following physics into the past, present, and future at the same moment.

CM: Do you approach writing free verse, form, and prose differently?

CF: No. I first begin all my writing in prose. As a lad, I wrote up to fifty pages on single-spaced 8 x 14 legal pads. I would capture the images, phrases, and lines that caught my eye, ear, and heart. The fifty pages might become one sonnet or many other forms. 

I write blues, jazz, poetry of witness, pastoral poetry, etc. I admire Hopkins and Etheridge Knight.

CM: What is the single most important attribute of a good poem?

CF: Tear away from the historical and cultural definitions of poetry until the center falls apart. There is good poetry and bad poetry. One needs an hourglass, compass, and the heart’s metronome to locate the best words in the best order.

CM: You have multiple poems that share the title “In a Just and Miniature World.” What is it about that title that captured your imagination? 

CF: If I may say so, I love its musicality and lyricism. I think of the child who walked into the wilderness and came upon a poem nailed to a birch tree. The poem was Loveliest of Trees. The child became a poet. I wrote In a just and miniature world decades ago in a poem titled “The Writer at His Desk” now called “The Writer”—the poem won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize judged by Fred Chappell. I read the poem outdoors wearing my father’s very old shark skin suit in front of the Jarrell or was it the O. Henry Sculpture? Maxine Kumin was the main speaker. I felt like Robert Frost reading trying to read against a strong wind. 

CM: Many of your poems combine images of the natural world with intimate scenes of family life. Does this suggest a special connection between the natural world and the human world?

CF: Yes! I attended the first Earth Day. As a lad, I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Observe and remove environmental racism! Save the birch trees! Save us from war!

CM: What role does American history, world history, and personal history play in your poetry?

CF: It is difficult to escape history. I try. Imagination is central to my work no matter the subject. Kafka knew there was no escape.

CM: You, along with your late wife, Wendy Fort, staged a performance, Afro Psalms: a Special Showcase in Ekphrastic History, with Charles Fort and Wendy Fort, that combined poetry with visual art and dance. How did you find these three mediums worked together to create an experience for your audience?

CF: I collaborated with my late wife with the dance she choreographed to my poetry. I wrote a libretto that was set to full choir and orchestra at Thalian Hall in Wilmington, NC. The poem went on to win the Poetry Society of America Prize for poem best set to music. I stayed at the Gramercy Hotel. The ceremony was hosted by George Plimpton across the avenue at the National Arts Club. Denise Levertov was the main guest. I sat in a rather elegant leather chair that once sat JFK. I sipped the rarest single blend scotch I could find.

I have read my poetry accompanied by nearly every instrument in the world. Violin to Piano to Double Bass to Saxophone. When the saxophonist was not available, I became the saxophone!

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––Christopher McCormick, Mid-American Review